What did you do in the war, Grandpa?

mr200525  What did you do in the war, Grandpa? A chart how my day is invested

  He ponders how he uses his days, as if he only has a few days to live and work. Imagining what his granddaughter might as him, “What did you do in the time of the pandemic?” he draws a chart in an effort to account for how he spends his time and its worth.

 What did you do in the war, Grandpa?

My granddaughter might ask me, “When teachers, students and parents were suddenly evacuated from the normal schools and sent home - the school doors shut and locked behind them – what did you do?”

I got ready to fight the enemy. The enemy used to be a vague, abstract notion I call ignorance – a plague of ignoring important things. I am a teacher, after all. My thing is art – specifically the art, craft, and design of printmaking. Art might not seem like a weapon.

I’m spending my days like an artist works on a large, extremely detailed painting. Instead of brushes and paint, I practice my content-building and access to my content as a printmaking teacher.

The art of printing is the ancestor of all science, technology, engineering, and mathematics which are designated as STEM, a theory that says young people who work all four areas concomitantly are preparing to fight the war on ignorance.

How I’m spending my last days

The corona virus pandemic blindsided us. We were warned – like we were warned about climate change and environmental disasters in the 1950’s. Like my father, who complained about environmentalists. He was practicing ignorance, ignoring the effects of DDT on birds for one thing.

Now two-thirds of the world’s bird population are gone. Not only because of DDT but by thousands of other man-made pesticides, herbicides, climate change caused by greenhouse gases, and the list goes on. It’s “Silent Spring,” as forecast sixty years ago, by Rachel Carlson.

Now Nature has unleashed her doomsday weapon – a virus pandemic powerful enough to stop human “progress” in its tracks and send human civilization on a downward spiral. A good thing for us. 28 years ago, scientists forecast that by 2022, Earth would not sustain human life unless we reversed our production and consumer binging.

But schools are where the cure might be found – not for the virus – but for the mindfulness of people who realize they love life, that they love other people and animals and all living things, great and small.

The chart shows how I’m spending my last days. I’m investing my life in teaching on the web, and my plan is to make a virtual world, a region named Emeralda, where prize-winning scientists, technologists, engineers, artists, and mathematicians convene in STEAM Teams and act on issues of the day. I’m there all the time, in my imagination.

It’s what I’m doing – as the chart shows – every day in the war. The chart, by the way, doesn’t show me living – but I am, thanks to my wife Lynda.